This all new water for me and I am open to all suggestions and advice. I have a very good home built machine running windows beta 7 which will go away soon. I have been wanting to try Linux for some time but do not understand all the varieties. I use the machine for surfing, soft games and video (backing up dvd's and some simple editing) and the normal stuff email, taxes and printing postage.
It is also on a network with 3 other machines 2 running vista and another windows 7. There are 2 tivo's, a blu-ray player, a PS3, a printer and a tv on the network also. The network is both wireless and mostly wired. The question is which distribution is best.
By the way I am rats109 which is a play on my initials and zip code.
Thank You for reading this and any advise you may want to put forth.

Try Ubuntu-8.04/8.10
Varieties of both include
Ultimate Edition 1.9/2.0
ArtistX
SuperUbuntu-8.10
Ubuntu Satanic Edition
Mint
etc
Ubuntu is very friendly towards ex-Windows users.

Very nice list above there.

If you are most likely to try Redhat (i guess out of likely professional use), you might want to try Fedora at home. Thats the Redhat sponsored free edition where they try out new features before it comes into the offical Redhat release.

Mons
PS! Welcome to LQ

Unless you mean *buntu, I have to disagree: Ubuntu itself uses Gnome, which isn't very friendly to Winfugees. My experience is that KDE is much more familiar than Gnome to people who are used to the M$ GUI. Therefore, Kubuntu is a better recommendation than Ubuntu.